Everyone loves a good campfire. Whether it’s making s’mores, relaxing, or practicing a bit of guitar skills, a nice fire is essential to your ideal camping experience. However, it’s crucial to know how to put out your campfire properly in order to avoid causing larger fires that can affect a vast radius.
1. Let the Flames Burn Down a Little
Once you feel like the night is winding down, your clothes have that nice smoky aroma to them, and you’ve sung Wonderwall enough times to make your neighbors angry, it’s finally time to let the fire die down a bit. Now, this step requires a little bit of patience, so plan ahead of time. Before doing any sort of extinguishing technique, you need to just let the fire die down.
This allows you to still enjoy the final moments of heat before needing to run to a blanket, but more importantly, it prevents the scattering of ashes and embers to the surrounding wildlife, but more on that later.
2. Spread the Coals Around
After the flames have died down a smidge, the next step is to push the coals around so everything can die down more evenly. While this step isn’t quite as essential, it’ll save you from having to repeat this process over and over, thus saving you a lot of time. This can be done relatively quickly, as you just need to use your handy-dandy fire poker or s’mores stick, then you just push the coals around until they start to die down and are in an even level. Then, it’s time to move onto the super satisfying part of the process.
3. Douse the Heck Out of It
Now it’s time for the fun part, because the next step is to grab a bucket, fill it with water, and dump it on the coals. HOWEVER, do this in moderation. If you throw an entire of bucket of water like you’re trying to splash it to death, you’re going to create quite the mess and make things a lot harder for you and other nearby campers.
Although it isn’t quite as fun, pour the water on the coals slowly, so they don’t have a chance to scatter. Plus, you get to hear the last of the fire hiss and smoke, which is extremely satisfying.
4. Making Sure None Escape, Spread Around the Ashes & Embers
This step is pretty similar to step 2, but requires slightly more finesse. You have to push around the ashes and embers, but need to make sure none escape the fire pit, otherwise bad things could happen. Be careful, though, as the ashes and embers can be a little more wily than the coals from step 2. The good news, though, is if you do this step correctly, you’re almost done. The bad news is if you don’t do this step correctly, you have to utilize step 5. Anywho…
5. Repeat Until Finished
Not too much to say about this one. Once you’ve made sure the ashes and embers are all contained, all you have to do is repeat steps 2-4 until you can’t see anything glowing in the fire pit anymore. After this, you’re almost done with extinguishing your fire and are that much closer to the sweet, sweet shadow realm of sleep.
6. Check for Strays
Now this is the step that is most often overlooked, but is just as important as everything else. Most of the time, it’s one or two escaped embers that can cause a big problem. So when you’re all done and your fire is properly extinguished, the final step is to check your surroundings in case one of those pesky buggers somehow got loose. Luckily, if you find one that got loose, it’s a pretty easy fix. All you have to do is let all your pent-up rage loose and stomp the ever-loving hell out of it, so it’s equal parts useful and therapeutic.